America’s Militarized Police

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's just us today, but that's okay because this is Stuff You Should Know.

The

is this a good idea, Edition?

Oh, I think it's a good idea.

You know, we're just going to kind of report what's happened over the last, you know,

60

years or so in the United States.

Yeah, there's been this increasing trend that, yeah, I guess that's about how long it's been going on, where the police departments across the U.S.

have become increasingly militarized.

And to be specific, it's not just a question of wearing tactical helmets and vests, carrying assault rifles, sometimes driving through cities and MRAPs and tanks.

It's also

a change in attitude that it's created, where

people are no longer citizens who are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

They are the enemy, and the police at that moment are an occupying force coming in full force to that person's house,

or even when they're not doing that, just looking intimidating to basically everyone everyone who sees them.

That's essentially what people who talk about this stuff consider the full scope of the militarization of the police.

Yeah, for sure.

And like I said, this has been happening since about the 1960s.

If you go back in time to like the 1800s when cops first started being a thing in the United States, they were initially just hired as politicians.

It was called a patronage system.

So they were kind of appointed.

It wasn't until the 19th century that they started to get a little more like, hey,

let's squash that patronage.

Let's hire police instead of appointing them.

So they basically don't work for politicians.

And that's when unions started being founded.

That's when formal training programs started.

I know a lot of this stuff we've covered in other episodes, but I know we talked about Robert Peel.

and the London Metropolitan Police is sort of a big North Star that when America started their like real police force, they often looked to London and how he did it.

Yeah, for sure.

And part of that was what's called the professionalism movement of police.

Like you said, no longer making them political appointees in the pocket of some politician who wants them to go rough up his opponent.

And part of professionalism, one of the central tenets, is that essentially the police is its own silo within society.

It's not influenced by politics and all that stuff, which is good in that sense.

But in the other sense, the police then kind of become their own,

well, police force.

And they make a lot of decisions about society.

And as there's less, I guess, control or input or influence from society, things can start to get out of hand.

On the other hand, professionalism also meant like, you know, people who are trained as police now know what they're doing.

They're actually getting professional training.

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it was a progressive era at first when the professionalism movement started.

But even early on, there was a guy in California and Berkeley, of all places, the chief of police there named

August Vollmar,

who, you know, even way back then was like, hey, I think, you know, it should be more like the military.

He had a quote where he said, after all, we're conducting a war, a war against the enemies of society.

So even back then, there was some ideological seeds being planted.

Other people have defended Vollmer in this movement and saying, hey, you know, he actually

is one of the people who first started formal training.

He's the first person to encourage de-escalation and hired the first black and women police officer.

So he also had, you know, people kind of sticking up for his movement as well.

Yeah, he's become kind of the poster child for who started all this.

And other people are like, that's just not really fair.

So either way, he definitely was

a huge proponent of police reform and kind of established a lot of the ways that police thought.

And like you said, part of it was this idea that there should be some degree of militarization of the police.

And then after August Vollmer, nothing happened for about 60 years.

And then in 1965,

things happened.

Nothing.

The police just went along doing their thing and everybody was happy with what they were doing.

Yeah.

Now I know what you mean.

In the 60s, everything turned.

And you can really trace the militarization of the police back to a couple of years in the 60s.

There are other things that happened along the way.

I think in the 80s, there was a shootout in Miami, 1986, that ended up leading to full-throated support for police getting access to bulletproof vests, which I really don't think is problematic.

Another one, we've done an entire podcast on the North Hollywood shootout in 1997.

Yeah.

That led access to police being equipped with long guns like assault rifles and stuff like that after that.

And in both those cases, the police were unprepared.

They were shown to be unprepared.

So there were steps taken to prepare them that you can kind of say

are military in nature, I guess.

But that's nothing compared to the effect that the riots of the 1960s had on the militarization of the police.

Yeah, for sure.

And we covered some of these in our episode on riots, but in 1965, the Watts riots occurred.

And then

a couple of years later, in 1967, there were riots in Newark and Detroit.

And this stuff was all over the news.

It was being widely reported.

Americans were getting pretty worried about just crime in general, sort of in the 1960s, thinking things were kind of out of control.

There was a poll in 1969 in Newsweek.

that found that 66% of white Americans thought police should be given more power.

And the Watts riots directly led to the creation of SWAT units.

You know, we talked about this in our SWAT episode all the way back in 2010.

Wow.

But there was a guy named Darrell Gates who, I'm pretty sure, isn't that the same guy who was chief during the Rodney King riots?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Well, back then in 1965, he was an LAPD inspector.

And

he basically said what you said was like they were just completely unprepared for how to handle something like that at that scale.

So he went directly to the military and said, Hey, I want to create a special unit that's more like you guys that can handle something like this.

And out of that came America's first SWAT team in Los Angeles.

Yeah, and SWAT teams are specifically considered paramilitary police units or PPUs.

Like they are a sterling example of militarization of the police, right?

And so you can thank Daryl Gates for creating this, like you said.

Although I suspect along the way, somebody would have come up with something like this since they already existed in the military, right?

So that was one big key point in the militarization of police.

Another big one came from Lyndon Johnson.

In 1965, under his guidance, I guess, the United States passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act.

And Johnson had declared a war on crime.

And part of it allowed the federal government to give military weapons to local police departments.

So that was the first time this is actually happening, all the way back in 1965.

And again, these riots, there were 160 riots in one summer, 1967,

alone.

So people were nervous.

And like you said, a lot of people were in support of the police having things like access to military weapons.

Then after that, a year later, there was the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.

And that created this permanent administration that oversaw transferring military weapons to local police departments.

Yeah, that was it was called the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.

And because of that, cops were like, all right, I mean, we can start, you know, police departments could start stockpiling these, you know, military-grade weapons.

And that's really when it kicked off.

People did, and this is a pretty important part of this episode, but

not everyone was just saying, yeah, this is awesome.

Some people stood back and said, wait a minute, why don't we like kind of look at like why these riots are happening?

Of course, we need to be able to deal with this stuff, but if if we get to the root of the problem and maybe try and stop them before they happen, that might be a good approach.

And so in 1967,

Johnson formed a commission.

It ended up resulting in what's called the Kerner Commission Report.

It was officially called the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, but it was named after its chairman, Otto Kerner.

And he said, I want to find out three things.

What happened, why it happened, and how can we keep it from happening again?

They surveyed different riots and uprisings in 23 cities and assigned people and investigators to go out and kind of get to the bottom of it.

And the conclusions of the report didn't lead to any substantive change.

It was basically ignored.

It was.

And that's, I mean, it was like the most controversial document ever produced by the U.S.

government that basically said there's institutional racism in the U.S.

and that is directly responsible for riots in low-income majority black areas, right?

But part of it was like part of the problem is heavy-handed policing.

And the Kerner report went even further, and they said

the commission condemns moves to equip police departments with mass destructive weapons, such as automatic rifles, machine guns, and tanks, weapons that are designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in densely populated urban communities.

So all the way back in the late 60s, this government-appointed panel is like, we should not be militarizing the police.

That is the wrong direction.

And, like you said, it was just totally ignored.

And not only that, rather than

go in the direction of getting to the bottom of the root causes of this stuff and trying to cure social ills that way, probably forever,

America went the other way and said, no, let's overwhelm these neighborhoods with full military-style force by equipping the police with military weapons and armor.

And

we'll keep riots suppressed that way.

And it worked, but at a really huge cost, which is essentially an erosion of trust in the police, not just in those communities, but across the country.

Yeah.

And I mean, if you're wondering, like, wait a minute, Lyndon Johnson did so much work for civil rights, this doesn't quite add up.

That was kind of one of the reasons he didn't bury the report.

I mean,

it came out and it was published even in a book, so it got people talking at least, but he never spoke publicly about it.

And one of the reasons why was because of his good track record with civil rights.

He was like, this report, he felt like it was an indictment on his presidency.

And he was like, I don't like the way it makes me look.

And so not only did he never even address it, but apparently when you have commissions like this, there are these customary letters thanking the commissioners for their service that they draw up, that the president sign.

I think they drew up those letters, but he wouldn't even sign those.

No, they sent him out without his signature because he was being a big fat baby about the whole thing.

That's essentially what happened.

Yeah, sure.

But yeah, because he ignored it publicly and because they refused to implement any of the stuff it went.

Well, it wasn't implemented, but it was also given a lot of media attention and it kind of laid the groundwork for discussions about race and the existence of institutional racism in America from that point on.

So even though Johnson ignored it or his administration didn't implement anything,

it did get some attention.

That book you mentioned became a bestseller.

There's a lot of media attention and it really laid the groundwork for discussions about racism in America and institutional racism that would come.

Yeah, for sure.

So

should we take a break and then talk about Nixon?

Yeah, I think so, because that's a really big turning point as well.

All right, we're going to take a break and we're going to talk about Richard Nixon right after this.

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All right, we promised to talk of Richard Nixon and his war on drugs.

And

I don't know why it didn't occur to me until 10 minutes ago, but war on crime, war on drugs, if we're talking about the militarization of the police, maybe they should stop using words like war about everything.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

As a matter of fact, some people basically lay the blame on the militarization of police in America on Congress.

Even Rand Paul, who I don't necessarily agree with traditionally, he wrote in 2014 in the op-ed in Time that it's basically all Congress's fault for police militarization happening in the U.S.

because of all of these policies that were passed over the years.

Yeah, so Richard Nixon comes along and in 1971 declared this war on drugs.

He very famously called drug abuse public enemy number one.

And, you know, there has always been drug problems in the United States, and along with that, ghost crime.

I don't think anyone disputes that.

Drug deaths were increasing at a pretty big rate in the 70s.

And

so he decides to do something about it.

If you talk to people on the inside, they'll say it actually has to do with other things.

One of his advisors' name was John Ehrlichman, who we talked about before.

But he said what the war on drugs really was, if you knew Nixon, it was a ploy to attack his enemies, which was the anti-war left, the progressive left, and black Americans.

He has a quote.

He said, we knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

Yeah.

And one of the hallmarks of Nixon's war on drugs was really aggressive policing, police tactics.

One of of the things that they set up was the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement, ODAIL, which was the predecessor to the DEA.

And this really aggressive approach moved the focus of

fighting drug trafficking by targeting huge drug traffickers, which was traditionally how law enforcement had done it, to basically busting like not even just low-level dealers, but drug users in their homes.

And one of the big things that they came up with to facilitate those raids on their homes, military-style raids on homes, was the no-knock warrant, another big concept in the militarization of police.

Yeah, and, you know, how it traditionally worked was you get a warrant and you go and you knock on someone's door

and you see if they answer the door.

And then when they answer the door, you

start the process from there.

A no-knock warrant is just what it sounds like.

We've seen them on the news when they just go barging in a house, basically.

Previous to this the drug enforcement agency had or the predecessor rather had conducted five no-knock searches in the five years leading up to the formation of o'dale and in its first six months um they had over 100 no-knock raids and over the course of about 13 months from april 72 to may 73 they conducted almost 1500 no-knock raids yeah

And one of the huge problems that people have with no-knock raids is that it's a...

It's just

it is very rude it results in property destruction if they when if they or I should say when they kick in your front door you're on the hook to replace your front door even if your house was mistakenly raided they use flashbang grenades that can injure people and I mean just police using grenades I think should kind of stand out to you.

They will engage in gunfire with assault rifles.

It can be a really bad jam.

But even like on a more fundamental level than when those things go really wrong or even when they go right and the destruction that can result is the philosophical change that they represent.

Something we talked about earlier, where if you go up to someone's house and you say you have a warrant, you say you're the police, you knock on their door,

you're treating that person like a citizen who is suspected of something but hasn't been proven guilty.

If you throw a flashbang grenade through somebody's window and kick in their front door and come in like a SEAL team,

you're basically saying you're guilty.

We're here to remove you and take you to jail.

And

you basically have very little rights, if any.

Yeah.

And any sudden movement, and I would imagine there's probably nothing but sudden movements when someone does that.

Yeah.

You're probably shot.

And as an animal lover,

that dog of yours that runs up and barks at someone that barges in the house is immediately shot on the spot.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of problems with these no-knock warrants.

They've been a target of police reform for years, but essentially there's nothing that's been done about them.

Yeah, for sure.

So, while this is going on, all this, you know, increase of militaristic approach, Daryl Gates is in LA.

He's got his SWAT team up and running in the 70s.

And there were some really high-profile shootouts.

We've talked about, it's funny how many of these things have come up over the years, but one famous shootout with the Black Panthers, another one with the Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA, that Patty Hearst was involved in.

We covered that one.

But they were very high-profile on-the-news kind of things.

And the whole concept of SWAT teams was all of a sudden like really in the public eye.

And in cities all over the country, you know, major cities for sure, and even smaller towns, they were like, hey, we want a SWAT team too.

Leading to the point where even though

there are no official stats, there was a criminologist named Peter Kroska who did some estimates that there are between 50,000 and 80,000 SWAT raids a year in the United States.

Right.

So that's to the point where we're at now.

It's also, well, and I think he also determined that in 1980, there were something like 3,000.

So that's quite an uptick over the years.

3,000 to 80,000?

Yeah.

I think one of the other overlooked influences on normalizing SWAT teams was the TV show SWAT from the mid-70s.

I think it just was on a season or two, but it was really popular.

So people were like, SWAT teams are kind of awesome.

Like you said, even small towns were getting these.

Right now, from what I could find, the smallest town that has its own SWAT team, not just access to a SWAT team, but they maintain their own SWAT team, is a town called Kerrville, Texas, and it has a population of 25,000.

So SWAT teams definitely spread.

And one reason why is not so the police can be like, man, this is so great.

I love carrying out these raids and using flashbang flashbang grenades.

I'm quite sure that is a sentiment among some cops, but definitely not all.

They are incentivized in every way, shape, or form to have SWAT teams and to use them to carry out raids for basically anything.

And the reason why they're incentivized to do that is because, like Rand Paul said, the federal government has been incentivizing it over the years with policy after policy, starting with Johnson and leading up till today.

Yeah.

And, you know, you get a TV show like SWAT coming out and promoting and encouraging and sort of glorifying the use of SWAT teams, yet Magnum PI comes out and not every city is saying, hey, we need super hot guys and Ferraris

investigating things privately.

No, but ironically, SWAT teams started to wear short shorts after Magnum PI came out during their raids.

It was a trend for a little while.

I sent you that picture of Tom Selleck at 80 years old the other day.

Yeah.

And you said he looks better than I do.

He does.

He does, man.

He's put on a little weight, but I got to say, man, Tom Selick still looks pretty dang good.

He does, especially for 80.

Sorry to be ageist, but it's true.

Yeah.

Handsome older man.

One thing you mentioned a second ago was the incentivization

of cops to carry out these no-knock raids and stuff like that.

That really ramped up with President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Under his presidency, they started doing doing more and more drug raids, a lot more frequent, a lot more intense, for sure.

And part of the reason is because in 1984, he passed the federal crime bill, which expanded civil forfeiture laws relating to drug arrests.

So basically, hey, if you conduct a no-knock raid and you go in there and you get a gym bag full of money and cocaine,

you get to keep that, keep those spoils.

Yeah, before they had to turn it all over to the Department of Justice.

The Feds got all that.

That's right.

So it literally

financially incentivized these no-knock raids.

Yeah, because if you're a budget-strapped police department and all of a sudden you can make millions of dollars a year for your police department or keep drug dealers' cars and auction them off or whatever, that's a huge financial incentive to carry out those raids and get as much of that money as you possibly can.

I don't think that that's to say unfairly that that's the reason why cops are organizing raids like that.

Like, I think that it's just like I was saying or we both said, a real incentive to carry out those raids rather than, you know, say non-military policing.

Yeah, for sure.

That was 84 was the federal crime bill.

Then a few years later in 87, Congress created a new office basically that

almost like a one-stop shop if you want to militarize your local police department.

They helped with the transfer of military equipment.

They literally set up a hotline

and printed a catalog.

Yeah, like the Sears Bush book for police chiefs.

Yeah, that they would send out to police chiefs.

And all of a sudden, it just sort of streamlined the whole process and made it much easier.

Yeah, which is, that's pretty easy as it is.

But the whole thing really kind of got going under Bill Clinton.

He kind of tossed a bone to progressives by coming up with the Community-Oriented Policing Services Act, I guess, which is.

Does that spell cops?

Yes, it does.

Good call.

And it's the opposite of professionalization, where they're like, no, we need more input from the community and society in how police police and all that.

That's one thing.

So it's like

conceptually, it makes sense in that respect.

But in practice, it really just gave more funding to police departments to hire more cops.

The really big part, though, came in 1997 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act that created what's known as the 1033 program,

which is it permanently authorized the Department of Defense to funnel military-grade weapons and supplies to police departments in the U.S.

It said, this is official.

These are no longer executive orders.

This is an act of Congress saying you guys can do this and let's make it happen.

Yeah.

And since that, which was in 1997 again,

they have

sold, I guess.

I mean, they're selling this stuff, right?

No, I well, they just giving it to them.

I believe that they're essentially giving it to them.

Yes, and if they're selling it, then police departments can apply for grants from the federal government

to buy this stuff from the federal government.

They're like, man, we're all on the same team here.

Ah, Lou.

That was a very bad wiggum.

I used to do that better.

But since then, there's been more than $7.6 billion worth of military equipment

given out to police departments across the U.S.

In less than 30 years.

That's a lot.

The 2000s really kind of changed things as well.

I guess every decade really did, but

the 9-11 attack really kind of refocused America's thoughts on public safety, law enforcement, that kind of thing.

And one of the upshots of it was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security,

which created a program in 2003 that essentially gave

grants to police departments for training against terrorism and equipping them with weapons to fight terrorism.

And so terrorism also gave local police departments a new justification and rationalization for becoming militarized.

Not only was it drug users anymore, now we have potential terrorists coming to the U.S.

and police departments needed to know how to deal with a terrorist attack, which, I mean, kind of, it makes sense.

It's tough to argue with.

It's just another kind of ripple in the pond of this whole thing, though.

Well, yeah, but what it did was, you know, you've got these SWAT teams sitting around in a maybe smaller town, and if they don't have any terrorists to go fight, they don't want that tank to get rusty.

Right.

So in the 2000s, we saw SWAT raids.

It wasn't just drugs anymore.

Like you said,

there have been SWAT raids on barbershops because they didn't have a license.

Yeah, there have been SWAT raids against teenage drinking, small-time gamblers, like the backroom poker game, stuff like that.

Once they had that system in place, they're like, well, we got to use this stuff for something.

Right.

So just having it makes you want to use it.

You're financially incentivized.

You can get it for free, all of this stuff.

And so if you add all that stuff up, you have every incentive to not only have a SWAT team, but to use them fairly often.

And then, also, on top of that, they're further incentivized to use no-knock warrants because the Supreme Court ruled in 2006 in a case called Hudson v.

Michigan, that even if you didn't obtain a no-knock warrant, which is a warrant that says you don't even have to knock,

if you didn't even bother to get that, and you still performed a no-knock search, came blazing in with flashbang grenades and kicking down the door and coming in through the window without a warrant, whatever evidence that you discovered was still admissible in court.

That's right.

So just one more incentive,

and maybe we should take a break.

I think we should, for sure.

I'm incentivized to take a break right now.

Very nice, man.

I'm going to dab your forehead with the cool cloth.

Okay.

And we're going to pick up in the 2010s right after this.

Yep.

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Because when you know, you know.

So, Chuck, we've been basically going on the premise this whole episode that the militarization of the police is problematic in and of itself, right?

And I wanted to understand exactly why.

Like, why didn't America just say, forget police forces, we'll just use the military all the time?

And so I looked into it, and essentially the answer that I could find from academia is that the military is well aware that it could take over the country anytime it wants.

So it submits to civilian rule.

And part of that is based on the idea that civilian rule is better for democracy than military rule, just because civilian politicians tend to know how to run things better.

There's more rights afforded to people who are citizens not being ruled by the military.

And so by militarizing the police and having a police presence that looks like a military occupation, it normalizes the concept of the military occupying its own country.

And so it erodes that custom of the separation of the military from domestic affairs that could conceivably lead to the idea of the military actually starting to run the show.

That's supposed to be a separation and the cops are moving that Overton window by becoming militarized.

That's essentially the basic argument that I've seen against police militarization.

There's all sorts of other symptoms and factors that it creates too that people use to argue against it.

Yeah, for sure.

And, you know, we can't ignore the fact because this is happening in real time this week as we record.

The current administration is, and this isn't militarizing the police, this is using the actual military on U.S.

soil.

The latest example is the federal military takeover of crime in Washington, D.C.

So that's that's kind of just happened over the last couple of days as we record this.

Right, yes.

So, one of the things that is leading the huge pushback of militarization, aside from more and more people being exposed to and unsettled by a police officer in full tactical gear holding an assault rifle,

is the advent of the smartphone.

And people can actually record this stuff and then broadcast it widely.

And so it's kind of captured the attention of the average person, I would say,

to the concept that police militarization is in and of itself a heavy-handed police tactic that is questionable.

Yeah, for sure.

And I just had another quick point.

I don't want to get too much grief for this, but there's a pretty obvious elephant in the room here, which is

if you think, oh, this is great and you say, well, hey, they got those weapons, so why can't the cops have those weapons?

They have those weapons because of policy as well.

You know?

Explain.

Well, citizens, like saying, hey, you know, citizens have assault rifles, like the cops should have assault rifles.

And like the citizens have the assault rifles because the U.S.

government said it was okay to.

So,

you know, it's sort of, I don't know.

I had the same thought that you can trace, you can trace that argument back to, okay, well, that's actually an argument in favor of gun control.

Yeah.

For sure.

I had the same thought because, yeah, that is a huge argument.

People will be like, well, if you take the cops' assault rifles away, only outlaws will have assault rifles.

It's like, no, take the outlaws' assault rifles away first.

Then we can talk about the cops giving theirs up, right?

They didn't used to have them, you know.

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, no, I'm with you.

I thought that too.

So you brought up smartphones,

or did you say smartphones?

I did.

I talked all about smartphones.

I talked about the iPhone 4, the iPhone 7, all the way up to the iPhone 13, and just stopped there inexplicably.

You know what's funny is a month before the new iPhone comes out, we talked about planned obsolescence.

My trusty old iPhone 12 is finally dying.

I think that's when that was during the time when Apple was caught purposely draining batteries to make you have to replace your phone.

I'm not a conspiracy guy, but I'm just saying, like, I was going to get the new one anyway, because I usually do every three, and I waited four this time.

So you waited eight months?

Five.

No, I waited five because I got a 12 and it's a 17.

But yeah, my battery just started going to zero and shutting off and rebooting.

Oh, wait, it just happened?

Your iPhone 12 just broke down?

Oh, like last week.

That's actually pretty good.

Yeah, I guess so.

But I was able to get an aftermarket battery installed for $65 from the

local guy.

I know you know this, but I want to share it to everybody.

I had a lawnmower, a gas-powered lawnmower, admittedly, but it was broken, like ready for the dump.

And I was like, no, I'm going to repair this.

So I called around.

There were some repair shops.

They wanted to charge some dough.

And I looked into what was probably wrong.

It's probably the carburetor.

And I said, I'm going to replace this carburetor.

And by God, I replaced the carburetor.

And when I was done, the first pull, that lawnmower started for the first time in years.

I got a text from Josh on Tuesday at 8.26 p.m.

I just fixed my lawnmower by replacing the carburetor and gas line, started on the first pull.

And then I replied eventually, I put a radiator and a VW Jetta in my 30s.

It's the only like.

Real manly thing I've ever done.

You said, bam.

All right, we should probably get back.

We had to have a laugh at some point.

So that part's over.

That's it.

That's the one laugh, everybody.

Be quiet.

Back to smartphones changing the game because all of a sudden, obviously, people can see this stuff on social media with their own two eyes

much more than before.

And in the mid-2010s, in 2014, the Ferguson protests were a really good example of this kind of happening.

They were protesting.

After Michael Brown was killed by Officer Darren Wilson,

the Obama administration declined to prosecute that, and police got really aggressive on these protests.

They were, you know, the armored trucks came in, snipers came in, those flashbang grenades that Josh loves talking about, and tear gas.

And there was a big public outcry after that, such that Obama said, hey, maybe we want to put some guardrails around this 1033 program.

Right.

And they did.

They said, okay, no more tanks and grenade launchers, among some other stuff.

But this is, I think, the first time anyone had stepped in and been like,

we need to take some sort of prohibitions or bans on what local police departments can get from the military.

Yeah.

And also, you know,

if you're saying, like, why don't they just get rid of 1033?

It's, hey, it's not going to happen.

But

critics of that will say, hey, it's not just military weapons.

They also take like our old air conditioners that we were going to throw out if a cash-strapped police department needs a new air conditioner and stuff like that.

And I guess my response to that is like, why don't you just create create an act about air conditioners then?

Well, right, exactly.

Like, there's no reason you can't continue the 1033 program, but ban military-style weapons and armor, you know?

Not bullproof us, by armor, I mean like MRAPs and tanks and troop transports and

like helicopters, like Blackhawks and stuff like that.

It'd be easy as pie to do that.

There's just nothing.

And I was kidding, by the way, about the Air Conditioner Act.

I know you were, but it is, I mean, it's a valid argument that there's actually lots of stuff that doesn't make the news that's really helpful to police departments that comes from the 1033 program.

That's just you could really easily adjust things for sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Obama rolls back some of this in 2015.

Then the next administration came in and very quickly rolled back those 1033 reforms.

And that's when the, you know, the sort of ramped up use of paramilitary forces to break up protests increase guarding federal monuments and statues and stuff like that that because of vandalism.

One of the things, I just want to say one of the things real quick that Trump did when he rolled back those reforms.

Bayonets had been banned previously, and they got allowed again as part of that executive order.

And if there is one thing that you do not need as a police officer is a bayonet.

Yeah.

Think about it.

We should do a shorty on bayonets.

It's interesting.

Yeah, it's the concept of putting a weapon on the front of your weapon.

Yes.

Like a less good weapon on the front of your weapon.

Yeah, that's meant to just stab somebody through the chest or the neck or the face or something like that.

And the concept of those things showing up at a peaceful protest in case it breaks out into violence, I just can't.

It just is mind-boggling to me that bayonets were ever allowed.

Well, it just seems very old school.

I mean, I know why they've made bayonets is because back then those long rifles took a long time to reload and maybe were hard to shoot in close quarters.

So, if you were all of a sudden had a guy run up on you in battle, you got to do some stabbing.

And stabbing from, you know, three and a half feet away is better than stabbing in your hand.

But this isn't the French Foreign Legion, you know.

No, and what you're talking about is a military engagement, not a law enforcement engagement.

There's no place for bayonets in law enforcement.

I think that that is objectively true as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, for sure.

So, in 2022, President Biden signed an executive order reinstating and expanding some of these 1033 reforms that the previous administration had gotten rid of.

They limited the use of no-knock entries

and, you know, basically tried to, you know, how it happens when different administrations come in, they try to undo what the previous person did.

Right.

And I looked high and low to see if President Trump had come in on his second term and reversed Biden orders.

And I couldn't see anything that said that all the talk about the reversal of the 1033 orders was from the first term.

But I did see that it's possible that Biden's executive orders were never implemented, so there was really nothing to roll back in practice.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, I mean, that's another thing in to itself.

You can get on TV and sign a thing, but implementation is where the rubber meets the road.

That's where it's at.

And you do get the impression that there is a cynical thing among politicians that, like, yeah, we're not going to touch this 1033 program in reality.

Like, it's like you said, it's not going anywhere.

If it didn't go anywhere after the summer of 2020, after George Floyd's murder,

when there's never been more and widespread focus on police, police tactics, militarization of the police, so much ink was dropped.

I actually found a Teen Vogue article from 2020 titled, What's a No-Knock Warrant?

Teen Vogue was talking about it.

And if it survived that, it's going to be really tough to ever just fully get rid of it if if you want it gotten rid of yeah and you weren't even researching you were just reading teen vogue on the toilet i couldn't believe it i was like you've got to be kidding talking about covid talking about no knock warrants teen vogue had their finger on the pulse

uh so the question remains you know is

this

move to militarize the police has it rather um led to like better public safety i mean because that's the ultimate goal, seemingly.

And it kind of depends on what you define, you know, how you define public safety, because that's going to change depending on who you are.

We have seen that militarization can and has escalated in counters.

There have, you know, it just, this is anecdotal.

I don't know if there's a study on it, but I feel like every time there's a protest happening and the tanks roll in, that's when it goes bad.

Yeah, that's exactly what a lot of people say about, say, for example, Ferguson.

From what I could tell, the riot started before the police responded, but they started

after the police showed up.

So, yes, some people are saying just seeing police like that is intimidating and antagonizing, I guess.

And that

I think the next day after the whole world was like, what are you guys doing in Ferguson?

The governor of Missouri told the Ferguson Police Department to stand down and send out the Missouri Highway Patrol.

And

they basically walked step in step with the protesters, the peaceful protesters, and they used that law enforcement tactic.

And apparently it was to pretty good effect.

Yeah, I mean, one thing is for sure is that it's led to

the killing of a lot more citizens by the police.

And this is a pretty shocking stat.

And, you know, anytime you're comparing the UK to the United States, it's, I mean, some people might say that's not a fair comparison because they just do things so differently, but that's kind of the point in, you know, delivering these statistics.

So The Guardian reported that in the first, very first month, in January only of 2015, American police killed more U.S.

citizens than police in the U.K.

had in the last 24 years combined.

Yeah.

One month, 24 years.

Right.

And those are typically

like used most often.

We guessed, we should say there are very few states that actually require police departments to maintain statistics, including on SWAT teams, how often they're used, where they're deployed.

Again, anecdotally, they do seem to be much more present and much more used in

predominantly black communities.

But there have been studies that have shown like this is actually counterproductive.

Did you see that one from Princeton from I think

2018?

It basically found that

the militarization of police has a counterproductive effect on police themselves in that it affects, it negatively impacts public perception of police.

And the study showed that it actually had a negative impact on public support for expanding police budgets.

So by militarizing, you can make a case that they're also shooting themselves in the feet metaphorically.

Yeah, no pun intended, right?

Shooting themselves in the feet with a grenade launcher.

Right.

And there was another study I wanted to mention, too.

It was from Emory here in Atlanta.

It was from 2020.

And there are these two studies that came out in 2014 and 2017 that are pretty prominent, and they're typically used to support the idea that militarization of police actually has a like increases public safety.

And this 2020 study looked at those studies and said these studies did not have enough data to come to these conclusions and basically debunked them.

And again, the reason why is because no statistics are required in most states on things like SWAT use.

So you can't possibly say that if you carry out 100 raids a year, public safety is going to go down by or going to increase by 10% or something like that.

You just, you can't do it.

So studies on that are inherently faulty.

And before you say, well, what about that 2018 Princeton study?

That

looks specifically at Maryland, which is one of those rare states that does require reporting by police departments.

Yeah.

So

you got anything else to say about it?

Plenty, but I feel like this is a good stopping point.

Okay.

I would love to hear from police officers who listen to stuff you should know out there who are for militarization and against it.

I would definitely love to hear those opinions and points.

Yeah, we'll read some of that stuff on the air.

Very nice.

Well, since Chuck agreed to read some stuff on the air, that means it's time for listener mail.

All right, we're getting a lot of good feedback about our heavy metal episodes,

which makes our heart warm because we

care about all the episodes, but I think everyone could tell we were pretty jazzed about those.

Yep.

This one, and I'll probably be reading a lot of metal emails over the next few weeks, but this one's from Kevin.

It's kind of fun.

Hey guys, thanks for the metal ups.

Growing up in the 80s, pop radio and MTV taught me that Metal's big three were tights, makeup, and hairspray.

I was way too cool for that and opted for the other big three, dismiss the cure and depend mode.

I was doing both, my friend.

Because you can.

But I always enjoy a musical history lesson, so thanks.

Later in life, I joined a cover band and will grudgingly admit that some of the hairband songs worked well for us, which is why I'm still myth that my idea for naming our band was rejected.

It was Cheryl Crew.

Oh, that's a great one.

That's up there with Bachman Cooner Overdrive.

Yeah, I'm generally not a pun band name guy, except for the Beatles and Cheryl Crew.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

That is from Kevin.

And I also wanted to mention real quick that I read in like four days, I had the Nikki Six

Heroin Diaries book sitting on my shelf for a couple of years.

and had just finished

What did I just finish?

I finished the Bruce Springsteen book, uh, the one about the movie coming out, and I dove right into the heroin diaries and read it in three days, and it is, uh, oh boy, I can't say it was a fun read.

It was harrowing

to read the diaries of Nikki Six in those days.

I just finished the letter N in Encyclopædia Britannica's suite of volumes.

Oh, very nice.

I'm just kidding.

I am kidding, by the way.

Oh, I know.

Okay.

Who was that that wrote in?

Kevin?

Yeah, that was Kevin.

Nice work, Kevin.

We appreciate that.

And to all of you who enjoyed the metal episodes, thank you.

Rock on.

And if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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